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Saturday, December 21, 2013

With the startup of PM Online we enter a new phase in the development of Pedigree Matching.

While my interest in the influence of pedigree on breeding and racing success has primarily been on the standardbred breed, I have been watching the top performers of other performance breeds to see if the same principles apply in their pedigrees. I am convinced that they do. Here are some examples drawn from the past year.

Thoroughbred breeders are generally convinced that inbreeding of any kind is bad and as a consequence the pedigrees often show little of the kinds ot patterns that show up in top standardbreds. In that respect the situation is similar to the approach of the French trotter breeders. The net result is that the overall success rates in producing top performers is less than half that of standardbreds generally. Similarily when this approach does produce a special individual it is because of the extreme outcross nature of such matings, the much touted hybrid vigour, that can and does succeed spectacularly on relatively rare occasions. But not all top thoroughbred performers come from such matings by any means. Four of the top earning horses in North America are the following:

Will Take Charge by Unbridleds Song
Game On Dude by Awesome Again
Orb by Malibu Moon
Mucho Macho Man by Macho Uno

The basic approach to pedigree matching is to outcross on sire line and inbreed maternally. The sire lines in thoroughbreds are more numerous than in standardbreds but the majority of sires currently standing in North America descend from Bartletts Childers, the full brother to Flying Childers a sire that is responsible for the vast majority of the modern day standardbred stallions. This sire line splits at a sire called Phalaris 1913 into two sire lines that are commonly described as the Nearco and Native Dancer lines. Nearco's line is famous for the great Northern Dancer and his siring legacy while Mr Prospector is a sire from the Native Danver branch that is prominent, as is Northern Dancer, both as a sire of sires and as a strong maternal influence through his daughters.

Orb is by a Nearco line sire and from a Native Dancer line dam and thus considered an outcross on sire line since the common ancestor on sire line is several generations away. He is inbred maternally to Mr Prospector 3x4 and also inbred to the Nearco line maternally with Northern Dancer and Turn To, both grandsons of Nearco, across the pedigree maternally.

Will Take Charge is outcrossed on sire line in similar fashion but the other way around being by a Native Dancer line sire and from a Nearco line dam. He also is inbred maternally to Nearco through grandsons Nasrullah and Northern Dancer.

Game On Dude is actually linebred on sire line to Nearco with the sire line through Northern Dancer and the dam sire through Turn To. Maternally , however, he is inbred to both Nasrullah and to Raise A Native, son of Native Dancer.

Mucho Macho Man has over $7 million made lifetime and he is outcrossed on sire line being by yet another line descending from Bartletts Childers through Roughntumble. He is strongly inbred maternally to both Mr Prospector 4x4 and to Nasrullah 5x6.

As you can see all four have pedigrees typical of the best standardbreds and I will point out two others. Remember the Breeders Cup race a couple of years ago when the great mare Zenyatta took on the best male horses and came second by a head to Blame. Guess what. Blame is outcrossed on sire line through Turn To (Nearco) to Native Dancer and is inbred maternally to Northern Dancer 4x4 and Raise A Native 5x4, And then there is the mighty Zenyatta. She shows yet another pattern familiar to standardbred breeders. She too is outcrossed on sire line by a grandson of Mr Prospector and from a mare through Turn To. Her maternal connections are a typical standardbred outcross pattern with her maternal lines through Hail To Reason (Turn To) and Hoist The Flag being duplicated in the maternal lines of her grandsire Machiavellian.

I'll add one more for the Quarter Horse breeders and that is the horse I posted about earlier, One Famous Glass, the quarter horse colt, by a first crop sire, plucked from a 1200 strong yearling sale for $10,000 based solely on a pedigree reminiscent of standardbred success. That colt has just been named Horse Of The Year in Canada for 2013. He is owned by my son Charles who created the original Pedigree Matching computer program.

Perhaps the quarter horse breeders, as well as the thoroughbred breeders, can learn from these examples that maternal inbreeding is not that bad after all.

Friday, December 20, 2013

The PM-Online service is offered on a subscription basis
with a variety of payment and access options. You can choose the bargain priced
Basic level that includes all of the functions of our previous PedigreeGuru web
service, or you can choose a Guru level subscription for more advanced
features, including all of your favourite Globetrotter program functions that
allow you to add, edit and store information on your own horses as well as do
complex searches and profiles for stallion performance and for yearling sales.
An added feature for Guru level subscribers will be the EasyMatch function that
provides stallion choices for your mares at the click of a button.

Visit PM-Online for a free two day trial and find out more
about the worldwide Globetrotter database that now contains over 2.2 million
horses including standardbreds and related breeds such as coldblood and French
trotters, and Tennessee Walking horses.

If you are interested in thoroughbred pedigrees then you
will want to try out Globerunner, a parallel service for pedigree research of
thoroughbred and quarter horses, again with an international database approaching
two million horses.

It is our hope that PM-Online will form the basis for a
truly worldwide database supported directly by the various registries. To this
end we are offering complimentary basic access to any registered member of any
organization that directly supports the database with ongoing data updates or
through commercial endorsement.

While other sites may provide similar
information we are committed to providing the tools to make the information
work for you in your search for a future champion performance horse. We encourage you to help us in that quest by sending us your suggestions for improvements.As an incentive we are offering subscription credits for
active database participation and also for referring this site to your friends. For every ten referrals that subscribe and identify you as
the reference you will receive a one year membership extension worth $100 at the
basic subscription level. For 50 referrals you can upgrade to Guru level for
one year, a value of $400. As a Guru level subscriber you will be authorized
to add/edit data and earn further credits to allow you to continue to use the
site free at the Guru level.

Guru members can also choose a lifetime subscription that
entitles them to become a PM Online partner with an interest in the future
development and success of PM Online.

For more information on membership options, including our referral incentive program and PM-Online partner opportunities, you can contact me personally by calling:

You will also find us on Facebook shortly and on our Pedigree Matching website. The link to PM Online is also on the website at www.pedigreematching.com and will be active effective Saturday, Decenber 21st.

Pedigree Matching

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About Me

Norman Hall is a long time active member of the Standardbred community in Atlantic Canada. He has been involved for over thirty years in the industry and has served the industry in many capacities. He has been the manager of the Prince Edward Island (PEI) Colt Stakes for the past 27 years as well as serving in periodic appointments as a director of the PEI Standardbred Horse Owners Association, as a director, volunteer manager and President of the Charlottetown Driving Park and as a founding member of the PEI Harness Racing Industry Association. He has been honoured by the PEISHOA as Active Horseman Of The Year for his volunteer activities and by The Atlantic Standardbred Breeders Association, with the prestigious Glen Kennedy Memorial Award, for his support of the breeding industry in Atlantic Canada. In addition to his involvement with breeding farms and breeders organizations in North America he has traveled extensively to give seminars on standardbred breeding throughout Europe, most recently conducting a five seminar tour in Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway, as well as seminars in Wales and Scotland. He has also traveled to Australia and New Zealand to assist breeding operations there as well as in Germany and France on several occasions.